chenchenchen: Possible Baby

Wyoming Project is pleased to present chenchenchen’s solo presentation Possible Baby, the artist’s first exhibition with the project space. Based on his 2012 image work possible baby, chenchenchen creates a video game in which the player gets to interact with the artist’s virtual offsprings, and the artist’s avatar.

chenchenchen’s 2012 version of possible baby deals with ideas of genealogical issues that are specific to the Chinese society, patriarchy, self-recognition, cyber-romance, the violence of gift, reconciliation, and what might be termed as “the artist’s Catholicism”, by collecting online and photoshopping images of female faces onto his own. The more than two hundred results then become the “possible babies” of the artist and the females.

Provocative, potentially offensive, and pseudo-autobiographical, the sterile images grow into game Find chenchenchen and Kill Him (2017), the player gets to - in a way that is unilateral and violent - communicate with the babies. The video game uses the reductionist language and simplifying logic of the virtual reality that is on the verge of becoming outdated, and corresponds to the artist’s ongoing project of the mercy of not killing (recently shown in the New Normal exhibition at the Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art) continuing his exploration of the motif of virtual death. Pushing the narrative of narcissism to an extreme, the artist is to be identified and targeted in the game, only to be killed as the evil, misogynist point of origin. The elimination of which subverts the idea of coup de grâce.

chenchenchen was born in Hangzhou in 1987. After graduating from China Academy of Art with a BA degree in Mixed-Media Art in 2010, he then continued his study at the Studio of Total Art, School of Inter-Media Art (SIMA) in Hangzhou and received an MA there. He became a phD candidate in the department of Philosophy, Capital Normal University in 2014.

chenchenchen’s practises of video, theatre, painting, installation and music are concerned with constructions of conceptions. Each individual project has its own unique theme and is distinct, his artworks interact with each other and constitute a series of parallel worlds. Simultaneously, they are coherently arranged into the panorama of chenchenchen’s conceptual framework of “Poor Sci-Fi” and “successology".

Founded in 2017, Wyoming Project sometimes does exhibitions and publications.